1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to disk drives. More particularly, the present invention relates to a presilicon disk model of a disk drive for design, development and validation purposes and methods for validating the design of a disk controller circuit to be incorporated into a targeted hard disk drive system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Time to market considerations and the fiercely competitive nature of the disk drive industry have led to increased pressures to accelerate the development of each subsequent generation of hard drives. Designing, prototyping and validating a new product, however, is time consuming and costly. The storage industry, therefore, has been seeking for methods of more efficiently bringing new products to market. Simulations provide a relatively inexpensive method of developing, testing and validating new disk drives. Simulation is the process of using software and/or programmable hardware to model electronic systems. Because it is expensive and time consuming to build silicon devices, simulation is used extensively before fabrication to verify that devices will work properly. Previous models and simulations, however, only modeled a few selected functions of the hard drive, and did not do so with the same timing as a real hard drive and did so only with extensively modified firmware.
However, unless all of the major components of a hard drive are modeled and emulated (with the correct timing), the usefulness of the pre-silicon testing and validation diminishes, as extensive modifications to the drive's firmware must be carried out to account for the less than complete and/or accurate simulation. In turn, as the simulation's firmware does not correspond to the firmware to be ultimately incorporated in the real drive, additional extensive testing must be carried out on the physical drive to validate the underlying design. What are needed, therefore, are methods and systems for simulating entire drives while maintaining the accurate timing of the operation of the various components thereof. Such methods and systems would enable the design, testing and validation of entire disk drives using the same (or only minimally-modified) firmware as will be incorporated in the resulting physical disk drive.